Hunting Truth Amid Smoke and Mirrors

We know Los Angeles is a place where image is all that matters, so long as you’ve got enough smoke and mirrors to hide the truth.

But sometimes even the thickest smoke and the brightest mirrors can’t keep the truth from peeping out.

That’s what happened recently at the Hollywood Roosevelt when I saw an announcement for a Checchi for Governor press conference. I thought I could see Al Checchi in person, rather than through his favorite medium, a television commercial.

But, to my disappointment, no Checchi, just campaign manager Darry Sragow, press secretary Elena Stern and a television set.

Where’s Checchi? I asked, looking around for the mysterious multimillionaire who intends to spend his way to the governorship. Sragow replied that the candidate wasn’t coming. We were there, it turned out, to see Checchi’s latest television commercial. This is how you cover politics in the ‘90s, watching an ad and then hearing the candidate’s handlers explain it, as if there were something to understand.

There were a couple of other reporters and two political managers, Garry South and Damon Moore, who are working for Checchi’s rival for governor, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis. Davis had had breakfast with political reporters in an adjoining room earlier in the morning, and the Davis aides decided to hang around and check up on the opposition.

Checchi’s man, Sragow, invited South and Moore to have coffee. The one thing that was interesting was the friendliness between these rival campaign managers. Usually, South is trying to persuade reporters to investigate Checchi’s tenure as head of Northwest Airlines while the Checchi team refers to South as “South the Mouth.”

But maybe it wasn’t real friendship. If the Mouth had been a real friend, he would have warned Sragow against having such a dumb press conference.

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Tuesday night, I expected a similar lack of substance, but this time I was fooled, thanks to Mayor Richard Riordan.

It was at a crowded reception at the Museum of Tolerance. The wine and caviar had been served and the guests settled into their seats in the museum auditorium, expecting to hear the same old speeches about how we should all get along in this diverse city.

The occasion was a reception for Joe Hicks, a longtime civil rights advocate who is the new executive director of the city Human Relations Commission, which has so far been more of a feel-good agency than anything else.

As is usually the case when official L.A. holds a multiracial event, there was an overabundance of politeness.

One speaker referred to the 1992 riots as the “unfortunate occurrence,” reflecting a tendency of human relations people to sweep animosities under the rug and engage in carefully choreographed dialogues about diversity.

Fortunately, Mayor Riordan was tone-deaf to these nuances. Instead of tiptoeing around reality, the mayor went to the heart of the matter and expressed his candid view that Los Angeles will remain a tense city until we assure kids of a decent public education.

“Give everyone a right to play on a level playing field,” he said. “If you are on a level playing field, all else follows.” But, he said, that doesn’t happen in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where children in poor neighborhoods have a slender chance of reading at even the eighth-grade level when they are old enough to graduate from high school. As a result, he said, we are “dooming them to unproductive and in many cases antisocial lives.”

This was such a sensible thought that I was surprised when the entire audience didn’t stand up and cheer.

Maybe it was the mayor’s delivery. But more likely the silence reflected the nature of the crowd, heavily stacked with political insiders who don’t have the stomach to take on the school board and the powerful unions that support board members’ campaigns.

This is a town where the style counts more than the substance.

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Let’s move on to another example of smoke and mirrors--the bathrooms in the Los Angeles high schools.

Listening to some of the principals, you’d imagine these rooms are usable and clean. When I wrote about the filthy bathrooms at Jefferson High School, the principal assured me they were cleaned every day. Later, I received a letter from a mother who said she complained to the principal about a filthy bathroom at Venice High, only to be told it was inspected hourly. As she put it:

“There were missing doors, broken locks, broken windows, missing paper towel and soap dispensers and . . . [there were] stalls in the girls’ bathroom that did not have sanitary napkin disposal units.”

I called school officials about the letter. I hope help is on the way. “The principal has acknowledged that the conditions in many instances exist, but all have been addressed,” said Carol Dodd, administrator for the Venice-Westchester school cluster. “All of the repairs of the conditions that were mentioned are expected to be completed by the first week in February.”

If that happens, it’ll be a rare case of image matching reality.